A girls cross country competitor sails over the ground

Competition is good or all of us. Whether we want to admit it or not, competition forces us to reckon with who we really are. What we care about. How hard we’re willing to try to get what we want in life.

Competition tears away the extraneous layers of our self love and self deprecation. Only a fool continues to abide in elements of their being that fail us in competition. And if we do not learn from our failures, we also fail to appreciate our successes in any constructive way.

Evolving purposes

Whether you run or ride, if you choose to compete you choose to engage in a process as old as the evolution of the human race. Pitting ourselves in a race against fellow human beings is both a test of self and a test of time. The only honest sports on this earth are the games in which self and time are the only elements. The rest, being dictated by a judge or a referee, may be competitions of a sort. But they are not as elemental and basic as a race on your feet, or pedaling a bike.

Naked endeavors

That means you learn something special and direct by competing in the sports you love. Running is the original and only human endeavor that requires no other implement. You can run naked and win the race if you try. Or you can dress up in $1000 worth of gear and perhaps go 2% faster, if you’re lucky.

Cycling naked doesn’t confer you much advantage, but it is funny to consider how close we try to come in cycling gear to going naked on the bike. The less wind resistance, the better. Triathletes come the closest of all to riding sans gear, dressed in unisingletbibs and nothing much else.

The point is this: competing in running and riding is a naked endeavor whether you’re dressed or not. You put it out there when you step to the line or roll your bike to the start of a criterium, a road race or a time trial. It’s just you and whatever distance you seek to cover.

Measuring competitive success

Every time we step to the starting line, we seek to define ourselves, for ourselves.

Perhaps that’s why so many people put stickers on their cars that say “26.2” or “13.1.” It’s a public statement that you’ve taken a risk with your self image and succeeded.

It works that way in all of society. Fortune 500 companies like to be included in that select group. People who run those companies tend to be driven types, pushing for success and demanding the same drive from the people who work there. We admire the competitive instincts in others while proclaiming them in ourselves.

But that doesn’t answer the question: What does it really mean to compete?

Defying convention

Defying convention is often equivalent to taking the driver’s wheel of your own destiny.

The answer is simple, and profound. To compete is to defy the convention that anyone but you alone can define who you are. You may win or lose against your competitors, but you learn something from that experience if you’re smart, or lucky. People who let themselves be defined by a loss or a DNF or other failed attempt at competition are simply at a loss to explain themselves any other way. And that’s the only real failure to be drawn from competing. If you let your last loss or your last effort become the final word on who you are, then you will be constrained by that idea.

But if you view competition as the path to continual growth; in sports, in business, or whether you run or ride–or both–then you are continually a winner. For having competed, and wanting to compete.

Competitive urges

The nature of our competitive urges can and will change with time and circumstance. You can’t win races at age 50 that you won at age 25. It simply isn’t possible. But you can redefine your victories in terms of circumstance and consequence, and not lose any of your cumulative edge.

When people say they will “not be defined by age” or that “age is just a number,” this is what they really mean. That they have not stopped competing with themselves, and thus maintain control of how they define their own image in the world.

That’s a valuable insight whether you are 15 or 75. Go out there and compete. The road is waiting. It’s why we all run and ride. Competing to define ourselves, rather than the other way around, letting others determine who we are, or who we want to be.

2Timothy 7: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”